The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the ongoing struggles and unfulfilled promises faced by freed African Americans after emancipation.
W. E. B. Du Bois articulates the deep disappointment among African Americans in the aftermath of their liberation from slavery. Despite potential progress and changes over the years, the promise of true freedom and equality remains largely unfulfilled, leading to a sense of bitterness. The reference to the 'shadow of a deep disappointment' highlights a collective yearning for a better life that continues to be hindered by societal ignorance and systemic barriers.
In practice
In a speech addressing social justice, one could reference this quote to emphasize the ongoing fight for equality.
Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.'
Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life.
School houses do not teach themselves - piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send out men. It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.
Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
For most people, it is enough for the world to know that they aspire. The world does not ask what their aspirations are, trusting that those aspirations are for the best and greatest things. But with regard to the Negroes in America, there is a feeling that their aspirations in some way are not consistent with the great ideals.
For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.
We can't throw the worst part of racism into the dustbin of history.
We are entering a new world in which we can choose to follow our own steps, not those that society forces us to take.
A problem is only a problem when viewed as a problem. All change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end.
We are continuously living a new life, and when the old and the new do not fit nicely together, the old - no longer able to contain the new - should be discarded.
If it's true, why do they leave us to live like this? With the hunger and the killings and the Games?" And suddenly I hate this imaginary underground city of District 13 and those who sit by, watching us die. They're no better than the Capitol.
For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is.
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